Sharing news and tips about bringing arts to market

Main menu

Monthly Archives: May 2017

In an opinion piece in Forbes earlier this year, technology writer, Aj Agrawal, called 2017 “The Year of Video Marketing.” Certainly, video content has seen tremendous growth and expectations are for that to continue. According to a recent report by Hubspot, this year, “video content will represent 74% of all Internet traffic.” For book promotion, authors and publishers have been using video in the form of book trailers for years and in that time, the trailer format has gained fans and detractors.

But digital storytelling can take many forms – and there are many tools now to make video creation – animations, topical timelines, interactive maps, slide shows and advertisements – easier than ever and they’re often free. I’ve written in the past about some of the timeline and animating platforms like Dipity, PowToon and GoAnimate, but there are a number of new tools and formats that offer additional formats worth experimenting with and imagining what might fit well into your plans for marketing books you write or illustrate.

One format is the cinemagraph, which you’ve probably seen even if you aren’t familiar with the term. These are seemingly still photos, but have one video element that moves and will repeat in a loop. To create a cinemagraph, with a program like Cinemagr.am or Flixel, you start with a short video, you then highlight, extract and save a small portion of the clip and that will then become the static element that the rest will play against – either in forward motion, reverse, or alternating forward-reverse. Once your cinemagraph is created, you can then add filters and hashtags and post on social media. Biteable is a very easy-to-use new online tool that can be used for free or an upgraded $100/yr. to create a mini presentation, slide show, intro piece or “explainer” video in just a few minutes. Claiming to be “The World’s Simplest Video Maker,”

Biteable provides templates that include scenes – either as animation, footage or still images, and then gives options for selecting a color palette and music – or you can upload custom colors or your own sound file. You can then add images, text and hashtags – and then Biteable will email you a finished file – mine took less than 15 minutes.

Fast forward to the next wave: A little over a year ago, Facebook announced the launch of 360-degree video, a format that bears watching as an outgrowth of Facebook’s purchase of Oculus Rift and their aggressive push in virtual reality technology. With 360 video, the film that’s produced allows the person filming to capture what they’re seeing in a full 360 degrees and the viewer can look at that video and by dragging their cursor, see in what the videographer saw in all directions – in front, all around and behind. This allows the viewer to share the full experience of that moment. The 360 cameras, like Samsung’s Gear 360 cost several hundred dollars, but that’s likely to come down as more enter the field.